Climate of Change (65 page)

The town was a miniature edition of a city, with its main population concentrated in multistory residential complexes, the limited manufacturing and services facilities close by, to reduce necessary transport. Covered walkways at several levels connected the buildings. Walking was encouraged; it was healthy and it saved energy.

The girls walked toward the address, which was a rented display shop on an upper floor near a car delivery access, and stopped outside, giggling conspiratorially. They even paused to do an impromptu little dance on the crowded street. Every Basque danced; it was in their blood, as were the lovely ancient folk songs and legends. They were being carefree girls, doing their own slightly naughty thing. One of the traditions that had faded in the liberalization of recent decades was the restriction against women participating in the Pastorales, the formal traditional dances. They even did the Sword Dance, concluding with the swords formed into an interwoven hexagon. The days of men dressing for female roles were gone. Now the genders could intermingle on stage as well as privately.

Others on the street smiled, their bodies faintly echoing the motions. What could be more delightful than young pretty girls being themselves? Basques were traditionally happy folk, forever joking and laughing despite being primitive. Haven counted on the meaters misjudging them as too ignorant to be anything other than easy prey.

There was a fair number of spectators, because off the farm, out of the wilderness preserve, the reality of the world was that it was thickly populated. The birthrate reduction policy had been in place only a generation, and there were still some eight billion people, most of whom were living longer than had been the case in past ages. In time the excess death rate would hasten depopulation, and when it got down to a single billion, arrangements would be made to increase the birthrate. Probably not in Haven's lifetime, though. Meanwhile every street was crowded, and privacy was largely limited to natural functions and small shuttered rooms at home. People were used to it, and took pains to get along. Tolerance helped.

“Let's do it,” Tourette said, as if struck by a sudden wicked notion. They entered the shop.

Haven knew that the meaters were already verifying their identities via the tag broadcasts. No problem there: the three were exactly what they seemed to be, schoolgirls skipping school. Had they been anything else, such as undercover police, the meaters would have played it straight, giving them samples to taste and judge, thanking them for their participation, and letting them go. The meaters were not fools; they were careful. That was why they were so hard to catch.

“Your ad,” Tourette said brightly in Euro. She wore a plain school dress that made her look two years younger but could not conceal her beauty. Not that it mattered; her tag established her age. “Dessert?”

The meater was a dapper-looking man with a badge indicating he was a specialty cook. “It's a new line of alga, grown in severely polluted waste water. Very efficient, especially considering that other strains of alga died. We are very proud of it. We think the taste is perfect. It has a special quality. But we want to verify that young citizens will like it.” He was circumspect, but his pupils dilated as he surveyed Tourette. He was noticing.

“We do like desserts,” Tula said. “But we've tried them all. Fungfoo gets dull. We're more adventurous.”

The meater's eyes flicked to her. She had loosened her blouse to show a bit more flesh than would have been encouraged at school. She was an innocently flirtatious maiden. “This is not dull,” he reassured her.

“Goody,” Fia said. She was the plain girl of the trio, but she did have decent meat on her bones.

Haven saw the meater's masked assessment. These girls thought there was safety in numbers. That nothing bad could happen to them as long as they stayed together. They were naïve fools. Their tender flesh would soon fetch a good price on the underground meat market. But he covered it by seating them at a table and presenting them with three elegant desserts. “Taste as much as you want,” he said encouragingly. “And give us your honest opinion. Will this do for a high-class restaurant?”

The three girls fell to, eagerly eating the desserts. And in seconds all three slumped forward, unconscious. Haven was surprised. She had
known they would be drugged, but thought it would take minutes to take effect, so that their team could close in before the process was complete. Still, this would do. “Hero,” she said, experiencing a small thrill of victory along with the danger. “They have struck.” Because the meaters had to be caught in the act, to nail the bounty. Now they could be caught and turned in, dead or alive.

“On my way,” he said. “Risk's got their van.”

Then it started going wrong. It would take only two or three minutes for Hero to get there, as he had been staying clear so as not to risk alerting the meaters. But Dapper wasn't waiting. He swept around the table and put his hands on Tourette, literally ripping off her clothes.

“Hero, hurry!” Haven said tensely.

“Trying,” he answered.

All Haven could do was watch as the man stripped Tourette and dragged her onto the floor. He opened his fly. His erect member sprang out. He was going to rape her!

On one level Haven knew this was folly, because the meaters needed to drag the girls into their van and depart as quickly as possible. On another she realized that the man wanted to rape a living girl, rather than a dead one, and he might not have a chance later in the process. So it made a kind of selfish sense. Still, it was a horror.

The man threw himself on her bare body and rammed into her, thrusting so hard her whole torso jumped. But that had an effect the meater evidently hadn't anticipated.

Tourette woke. Maybe it was because her nervous system was not quite normal. Maybe she hadn't eaten enough of the drugged pudding to be knocked all the way out for long. Maybe she simply didn't like getting raped. She was sexually experienced, but this was something else.

She struck that man on the side of his head with her wrist. It was no token blow. Tourette, like all Basque children, was an avid player of handball, pelote, their national game along with its cousin jai alai. Her wrists and hands were hardened from years' experience striking the hard little ball, and she had muscles where it counted. There would be a bruise.

Bruises. Tourette followed up with a flurry of blows by both hands,
battering the man's ears painfully. He tried to jerk his head up and clear, but she followed him, now striking at his face. In a moment his nose was bleeding and his eyes were bloodshot. He lifted up off her—and she caught him with a knee. Where it counted.

Hero burst into the room. Now he saw his daughter savagely attacking the man, and realized at least part of what had happened. He clubbed the meater on the head with his own hardened fist, knocking him unconscious. Then he enfolded Tourette, who at last was able to relax and cry. She was going into a seizure, but at this point that hardly mattered.

Craft followed Hero in, and went immediately to the two girls, who were stirring. He enfolded Tula. So it truly was mutual, Haven noted; he did care about her. As if there could be any real doubt. Haven was already feeling better about it. The two really were, as Fia had said, well matched. The highly competent man and the brave and beautiful girl.

The rest was routine. Hero summoned the police, who took possession of the sadly battered meater and his partner in the van, whom Risk had conked on the head as he labored to start the pied motor. Both would be in need of the universal health-care treatment Euro provided, before they were put on trial. The police verified the identity of the meaters, who turned out to have a long record, and authorized the bounty.

The Family had done a public service. They had also secured their finances for the winter. They had paid a cruel price; Tourette would not recover her emotional balance for some time. Keeper would surely help her a lot.

It had been a rough day. But they had survived. That was what counted.

Whether there will be such a thing as fungfoo is questionable, but the problems of population and global warming are real. If there is not something of the sort, the near future will be much uglier than this. The twin pressures of the sheer numbers of people, and the loss of agricultural capacity will lead to wholesale starvation. People will not simply lie down and expire; there will be savage warfare for edible resources.

What of the Basques? How did they come to have such a difficult language, seemingly unrelated to any other? That is as yet unknown, as is their early history. It is theorized that they are a remnant of early peoples who were living in the area before the great expansion of the Indo-Europeans, managing to stave off the cultural onslaught, there in their mountain fastness. That their language was spoken there 5,000 years ago, before any of the contemporary people arrived on the scene. Cave art in the region dates back 15,000 years. Could that have been by the same people? But they do not seem to be significantly different from their neighbors in anything except language. The project to examine DNA around the world may in time determine whether they differ from the neighbors genetically as well as in language. Blood-typing suggests that they are indeed distinct from others in Europe. But there has surely been much physical admixture as well as cultural. They fought over the centuries to retain their independence, but with imperfect success. The later twentieth century saw the Basque Separatist Movement in Spain, an often ugly guerrilla campaign. But this may well have been justified by the cruelly repressive measures taken against them by the government, as was the case elsewhere with the Australian Aborigines, the Central American Maya, the African Xhosa, and the Armenian neighbors of the Alani. Brutality breeds brutality. At least, in this conjectured future, the Basques achieve independence.

 

In 1966 my wife and I visited science fiction genre writer Keith Laumer. He was at that point a successful professional writer, readily able to sell what he wrote, who lived about forty miles north of us in Florida. I was a new writer, with about eight story sales to my credit, eager to get the word from an established one. It was a pleasant day-long visit, and I learned many things in the course of our discussion. In a subsequent year he had a stroke and became a mean man, and I never met him again thereafter. The stroke effectively cut off his writing and ended his marriage, until finally he died. It was a sad conclusion to a promising career.

But I inherited his reputation for being an ogre at conventions, though I had never attended one, and that was to dog me for decades. Apparently fans and other writers did not bother to distinguish between two genre writers living in west central Florida. I even wrote a novel in which an ogre was the hero,
Ogre, Ogre
, which became my first national best seller, perhaps the first fantasy paperback original ever to do so. It didn't seem to matter in that respect. So my career flourished commercially, while my personal reputation remained low, though I have always treated both fans and other writers courteously, as those who have interacted with me directly know. Well, in fanzines—amateur magazines—when someone came at me with guns blazing or with a false accusation, I put him down; I never suffered fools or rascals
gladly. Maybe that contributed to the determined effort of some to cast me as a talentless lowlife. So my life within the science fiction and fantasy genres has been anything but placid, and I owe organized fandom essentially nothing. And it all seemed to start with Keith Laumer.

But there is another connection to the man. In the course of our discussion I mentioned how I had aspirations to write ancient historical fiction, though I regretted not being able to take it back beyond historical times. He asked something like “Well, why
don't
you?” A simple question, and it made me realize that I was needlessly limiting myself. That was the point at which the GEODYSSEY series came into conceptual existence. I started collecting books on history, archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, and anything else relevant to the human condition as I wished to write about it. For a quarter century I built up my library, and pondered how to handle the huge project.